John Wooding

Adolescent Work Quality: A View From Today’s Youth

Adolescent employment is commonly valued in the United States for its ability to promote youths’ positive psychosocial development. Empirical research, however, suggests the extent to which youth reap such benefits from work is largely a function of work’s quality. This study investigated adolescent work quality by examining the extent to which characteristics associated with positive or negative psychosocial outcomes are found in the jobs adolescents hold today. Our findings from surveys and interviews with working youth show that contemporary adolescent jobs provide at least moderate levels of the characteristics that promote positive psychosocial outcomes and some of those that promote negative outcomes. Adolescent jobs have the greatest capacity to encourage positive psychosocial development by providing opportunities for youth to be helpful and, to a lesser extent, to be around supportive others and to learn new things. Improvements in other areas of work quality are needed to maximize work’s potential to contribute positively to adolescent psychosocial development.

The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union: refining strategies for labor.

In a period of declining union membership and severe economic and environmental crisis it is important that labor unions rethink their traditional roles and organizational goals. Responding to some of these problems and reflecting a history of innovative and progressive unionism, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) has sought to address occupational and environmental health problems within the context of a political struggle. This study suggests that by joining with the environmental movement and community activists, by pursuing a strategy of coalition building, and by developing an initiative to build and advocate for a new political party, OCAW provides a model for reinvigorating trade unionism in the United States.

Down on the Farm: The Agricultural Extension Service as a Model for Manufacturing?

The decline in manufacturing in the United States has led to calls for more active support and intervention by the government for the manufacturing sector of the economy. Former Labor Secretary Reich, for instance, advocated a pro-active government “industrial policy,” although that term no longer seems to be in fashion [1]. Many agree, however, that the state should provide more structural support to the manufacturing sector and look to the Germans or Japanese as a model of governmental intervention and guidance. Indeed, European and Southeast Asian economies often have been cited as examples of ways in which the U.S. economy can become more competitive in manufacturing and as a rationale for greater government participation in support of industry. In their discussion of the “developmental state,” Ferleger and Lazonick cast a generally approving, although sometimes critical, eye on the model of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service [2]. Seeking to analyze the impact of government intervention, they review the generally recognized positive effect of the Service on agricultural productivity. “The contribution of federal, state and local governments in the United States to agricultural productivity represents one of the most “successful examples in modern economics history of the beneficial impact of the developmental state on a single economic sector” [2, p. 69]. Implicitly, Ferleger and Lazonick endorse an extension model as a form of state policy, one that would encourage economic growth and the continued relevance and vitality of the manufacturing sector in the United States. Such a policy, however, cannot be promoted without a deeper consideration and critique of the Agricultural Extension model.

Dire States: Health and Safety in the Reagan-Thatcher Era

T ENS OF THOUSANDS OF AMERICAN workers have died on the job since 1981 81,400, according to a recent report. Many hundreds of thousands more have contracted occupationally caused disease and died from it. In the United States today, six workers die each workday hour from industrial accidents, 1.8 million suffer job injuries every year and 60,000 permanent disability every year. Thus, more Americans die from workplace accidents and disease than from poisoning, fire, homicide or transportation accidents. This spiraling in accidents and disease is much more marked in the high-risk occupations (agriculture, mining, construction, transportation and manufacturing all predominantly blue-collar jobs). Further, if the overall small improvement in injury rates that began in the 19705 had continued after 1980, it is estimated that 9,115 American workers would still be alive today. (l) As in the United States, the incidence of accidents and fatalities at work in Britain this century was interrupted and reversed in the 198Os. The actual number of fatal and major injuries in British manufacturing has risen every year since 1983. Between 1981 and 1985 alone, the incident rate for deaths and major injuries in manufacturing jumped by 30 percent and in construction by a massive 41 percent. (2)It is still increasing.And these figures do not include fatalities resulting from occupationally caused disease that one government study estimatesat about 8,000 deaths per year. (3) Why have deaths and injury on the job increased so dramatically in Britainand the United Statessince 1980? Why, when the research, regulation and conflict around workplace health and safety issues have seemingly been so extensive, are more Britons and Americans now being killed, injured and made chronicallysickby the work they do?

Rewarding Community-Engaged Scholarship: A State University System Approach

The need for new and revised structures to reward new forms of scholarship is being examined nationally and globally. It is also being examined on campuses that make up the University of Massachusetts system, all which are classified by the Carnegie Foundation for Community Engagement. This paper reports on the collective exploration by the five campuses of the University of Massachusetts to understand whether the existing academic policies sufficiently and appropriately rewarding community engagement and publically engaged scholarship enact the core mission of the University of Massachusetts to effectively generate knowledge, address social issues, and fulfill its academic and civic purposes.